CHAPTER XV
Gaza at Last
During the days immediately following the capture of Beersheba the mounted troops were kept exceedingly busy, for our position was yet by no means secure. Every day the Turks in the hills made an attempt to drive us eastwards into the desert and every day we strove to push them back on to their defences at Sheria. It was a series of battles for the wells, in effect, for here the eternal problems of transport and water were acute. The former was more or less solved in time for the big operations; the latter was the difficulty it had always been for the past two years, but in a different way. In the desert, whilst the wells were few and far between they were seldom more than fifty or sixty feet deep; in the district around Beersheba there were, to exaggerate a little, almost as many wells as in the whole of the Sinai Desert, but you could not get at the water! Scarcely a well was less than a hundred feet deep and most of them were anything over that up to a hundred and eighty; of course there were no pumps. The old shadouf of the desert, unwieldy though it was, would have been a veritable godsend to the troops here.
A cavalryman could not pack a two-hundred foot coil of the lightest rope on to his saddle; it was as much as he could do to climb into it over the conglomeration of picketing-pegs and ropes, rifle-bucket, and sword which constituted his full marching order, and it was more or less the same in the artillery.
Those patriarchs of old who built the wells would doubtless have been vastly diverted to see a trooper sit down and solemnly remove his putties with which to lengthen a "rope" already consisting of reins, belts, and any odds and ends of rope he had acquired, and when even these additions proved insufficient—! It was a joke which matured but slowly.
Imagine half a brigade of cavalry clustered round a well frantically devising means to reach the cavernous depths, while the other half were fighting like tigers to keep off the Turks a few miles away! It was nothing out of the ordinary for a squadron or battery to take five hours to water their horses; and it added a piquancy to the situation that you were never quite sure when a marauding party of Turks would appear over the top of a neighbouring hill. Ultimately the extraordinary exertions of the engineers saved the situation; with incredible labour and ingenuity they fixed pumping-appliances to the wells.
They must have used most of the kinds known to science, and assuredly a great many not in the textbooks. In the course of their work they performed the functions of a hundred trades—including divers: in fact a large part of their time was of necessity spent in the water, and a singularly unpleasant business it must have been, dangling for hours at the end of a rope in the dank atmosphere of a well. Practically everything had to be done in the first two days after the capture of Beersheba in order to secure our precarious hold on that place; and with the lack of quick transport—for the country was too rough for motors, and camels are very slow—the shortage of rope and appliances, with, in fine, everything against them, the engineers in successfully accomplishing the feat added one more to their already imposing list of miracles.
Let there be no mistake about it; it was a miracle and one performed only by the most complete abnegation of self. Men who doubtless would have groused at home had they been asked to work for a couple of hours overtime at bank or office or works, here slaved for twenty-four hours at a stretch without bite or sup, and then after a short rest went on for another twenty-four. It is astonishing what the human frame can be made to do, when it is driven by that indescribable thing variously called morale or esprit de corps or duty.
The same feeling of superb confidence in the outcome animated the whole army, from the men clinging tenaciously to Beersheba to those straining impatiently at the leash in front of Gaza. The turn of the latter came on November 1st, and the account of their exploits must be taken from official sources, since by some inexplicable oversight on the part of Nature, a man cannot be in two places at once.
According to General Allenby's dispatches, it was decided to make a strong attack on some of the ridges defending Gaza, for the purpose chiefly of preventing the enemy from sending reinforcements or reserves across to the other flank. Also, any gains would be of material assistance when the time came for striking the big blow in the centre. The first part of the attack was made by the Scotch division on Umbrella Hill, previously mentioned in this narrative as being the scene of a raid by the same troops in the middle of June. Just before sunset the artillery put up a tremendous bombardment which lasted until dusk, and shortly before midnight the Scotsmen attacked the hill. To many of them it must have been reminiscent of their desperate assault on Wellington Ridge, during one phase of the battle of Romani, for Umbrella Hill was somewhat similarly shaped and the approach to it was over a wide expanse of heavy, yielding sand. But here the Turks were partially taken by surprise, and the Jocks were amongst them and had bundled them out of their trenches almost before they knew, though as usual they fought desperately hard once they were alive to the situation.